White Beech: The Rainforest Years (14 page)

‘That’s the new Advancetown. It used to be down there,’ Ken gestured with his left hand, ‘where the original track down from Beechmont met the old Numinbah Road. In 1970 or so it was decided that the dam on the Little Nerang River would have to be rebuilt on a far bigger scale to ensure a reliable water supply for the expanding Gold Coast, and so the valley was flooded and Advancetown went under water. A timber-getter called Ernest Belliss built a pub there. For eighty years the old bullockies who hauled the timber out of the hills used to meet and do business in the Bushmen’s Bar. It was an early slab-built structure, a really important part of local history. Belliss invented the name Advancetown and donated land and money to build a school. All gone now.’

A sign high on the steep verge advertised the Advancetown Hotel.

‘Is that the same building?’

‘No. They did bring the Bushmen’s Bar up here and set it up behind that new building, but they soon sold it. It’s on private property somewhere, I think.’

I know now that Belliss was an Englishman, from Shropshire, who came out to Australia in 1866. He is also the man who is believed to have plied one Aboriginal group with liquor and egged them on to attack others who had settled on land on the lower Nerang that had been set aside for an Aboriginal Industrial Mission. According to local man Carl Lentz, Belliss lost no time in getting up ‘a petition with a request to the Lands Department, he got plenty of signatures, to have the Natives reserve thrown open for selections . . . It was divided up in smaller portions and selected in quick time. Belliss selected a big share with plenty good hoop pine and other timber on it, and built a sawmill adjoining the mission station.’ For this estimable service a tributary of the Nerang now rejoices in the name Belliss Creek, if you’re driving one way, and Bellis Creek if you’re driving the other. Nothing remains to indicate that a gallant band of German missionaries had once moved heaven and earth to keep a foothold for Aboriginal people on the Nerang River.

We passed another sign. ‘The Hinze Dam. Who was Hinze?’

‘Russ Hinze was Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s local government minister,’ said Ken. ‘Not a local hero, as you might imagine. A lot of people had to move when the valley was flooded, and the people living above the lake had no way of getting to the coast when the road went under water. The dam’s been raised once and it’s due to be raised again. By 2010 the Advancetown Lake will cover 1,640 hectares. The upside is that the catchment can’t be zoned for development. You can fish here if you like; they’ve stocked it with bass, perch, Mary River cod, Saratoga, stuff like that. But you need a permit.’

‘I’d rather get me a flathead out of the ocean.’

‘Me too,’ said Ken. ‘The old Numinbah Road ran along the river, which had its disadvantages because it went under water fairly regularly, but it meant there were plenty of fishing holes and picnic spots. Not to mention all the old pioneer homesteads that were swallowed by the lake.’

East of the road a knob-like head reared itself. ‘That’s Page’s Pinnacle. It used to be called Pine Mountain, but once the pine was logged out, they gave it a new name. The old name was already being used for a place near Ipswich.’

‘Who was Page?’

‘Sir Earle Page, the politician. He took up land round here, took the timber off it and then sold it.’

A Harley Davidson motorbike swung around the bend ahead and came roaring towards us at high speed. A dozen more followed it, all ridden by men with beards and long grey hair, tricked out in full leathers, gauntlets, helmets, goggles and boots.

‘Bikies like this new road because there’s so many curves and so much reverse camber. Nobody else likes it much. They say it was designed and engineered by computer and the computer got it wrong. You might have noticed the crash zone sign? Bikies come to grief here fairly often. Just makes it more popular.’

I had already noticed several wayside shrines to fallen bikies, bedizened with plastic flowers, beer cans, and T-shirts. I peered through the trees for a glimpse of the dam. The vegetation was a mix of eucalypts, Forest Red Gum, Grey Gum, Grey Ironbark, White Mahogany and Pink Bloodwood. The eucalypts seemed greener than I was used to and the understorey was grassier. Two of the grasses were native, Kangaroo Grass,
Themeda australis
, and Blady Grass,
Imperata cylindrica
. Casuarinas, that like to grow in lines along creeksides, had colonised the road cuttings. The country grew more rugged; the road straddled narrow gullies and the curves had got sharper. Some of the gullies were named.

‘Does Black Shoot Gully mean what I think it means?’

‘It’s nothing to do with shooting blacks,’ said Ken. ‘A “shoot” is actually a chute. The timber-getters would send the cut timber straight off the mountain down a chute which they dug out and sometimes lined with felled timber. Back in the day the Black Shoot was the main way of getting from Beechmont to Advancetown. I have heard that when the kids from the valley had to go to school up on Beechmont, this is how they got there. Apparently the school bus used to get up and down this way, but it’s hard to imagine.’

We had entered the Numinbah Valley, as the valley of the upper Nerang River is known. We crossed it by the new Pine Creek Bridge, with not a Hoop Pine to be seen, and entered the Numinbah State Forest, ‘of a thousand uses’. A sign by the Numinbah Environmental Education Centre featuring sweet-faced forest fauna asked us not to litter the valley. ‘The locals are watching you’. Further on was a ‘Forest Park’ with toilets and picnic tables.

‘That’ll be drowned after they raise the dam,’ said Ken. ‘They’ll need a new bridge for the Pocket too.’

‘What is the Pocket?’

‘It’s the area between the Nerang River and the scarp of the Lamington Plateau. One way in, same way out, hence the Pocket.’

We passed through what would once have been known as a township, and is now called a village on its signage and a suburb of Gold Coast City everywhere else. The locals knew it as Upper Nerang; the authorities named it Numinbah Valley. The most imposing building in it is the School of Arts. In 1925 subscriptions were taken up and free hardwood was supplied to build a cultural centre for the residents of the Upper Nerang Valley, where concerts, lectures, performances and dances could take place.

‘This is Priem’s crossing. Karl Priem was the first man to grow wine in the valley,’ said Ken. ‘And possibly the last.’

A spectacular volcanic plug had popped out of the river flat on the west side of the road. ‘That’s Egg Rock. During the war airmen trained there for survival in the New Guinea jungle. That scarp beyond it is Ships Stern.’ (Ships Stern, a rhyolite rampart hanging off the side of the Lamington Plateau, used to have an apostrophe. You wonder why the Geographic Names Board didn’t eliminate the ‘s’ as well as the apostrophe. Ship Stern makes more sense than Ships Stern.)

On the other side of a single-lane bridge was an imposing timber gate. Signs warned visitors to announce themselves to reception. ‘What’s that?’

‘That’s the prison farm. Her Majesty’s State Farm Numinbah. Or the Numinbah Correctional Centre.’

‘Why does everything round here have two names?’

‘More,’ said Ken. ‘It used to be called Whitinbah State Farm for some reason.’

‘Villages in Britain still carry the Norse names given them by the Vikings eons ago. Here in Queensland names seem to change every five minutes.’

Ken laughed. ‘It gets worse. This is Natural Bridge. It used to be called Upper Numinbah, but they changed it to avoid confusion with the Numinbah on the other side of the border.’ As I was to discover, that Numinbah and this Numinbah were two parts of the same place. A small park appeared in a loop of the river on our right. Ken explained. ‘This is where kids used to go for the big splash off a big old river gum, but that’s gone now. The shire council took the place over in the Seventies and shmicked it up with toilets and barbecues and garbage bins, and called it Bochow Park.’

The air was growing humid and the vegetation had changed. On the roadside only the Camphor Laurels stood proud and unencumbered, wrapped in their own toxic vapours, while the native trees suffocated under curtains of Balloon Vine and Morning Glory. Around and between them Scheffleras, Jacarandas, Coral Trees, Traveller’s Palms and Cocos Palms vied with every kind of gaudy suburban garden escapee. The Scheffleras are
Schefflera actinophylla
, native to the Australian wet tropics. In their native plant community they are held in check by competition; in south-east Queensland they are an aggressive intruder. Their umbrella-shaped inflorescence is loved by native birds who drop its seeds everywhere.

Everybody loves Jacarandas, which flower in violet-blue panicles on their bare branches. As soon as the Jacaranda was introduced it was an absolute must-have for Australian gardeners. The gardening correspondent of the
Sydney Morning Herald
(3 December 1868) waxed lyrical in its praise:

This most beautiful flowering tree is a native of Brazil, and no garden of any pretentions can be said to be complete without a plant of it. The specimen in the Botanic Garden is well worth a journey of 50 miles to see. Its beautiful rich lavender blossoms, and its light feathery foliage, render it the gem of the season . . . the difficulty of the propagation . . . overcome, Jacaranda mimosifolia, instead of being rare and scarce, will now be within reach of all who love a garden . . .

In Queensland, Walter Hill, curator of the Brisbane City Botanical Gardens, was the first person to show a specimen of Jacaranda, at the Queensland Horticultural and Agricultural Society Exhibition in October 1865 (
BC
, 26 October). The Jacaranda he showed was described as a shrub; over the years it would have grown to about thirty metres in height and produced copious quantities of seed. A hundred and fifty years later Queensland has woken up to the fact that
Jacaranda mimosifolia
is an invasive species, which doesn’t mean that nurserymen have stopped selling it or that gardeners have stopped planting it. The town of Grafton on the Clarence River has all its streets lined with Jacarandas so that for six weeks every year the whole town turns purple. The same massive error of taste has been repeated in the town of Ipswich, south-east of Brisbane. In its home range of north-western Argentina and Bolivia the Jacaranda is now listed as vulnerable.

In the same show in 1865 Hill also presented ‘four specimens of the coral tree, which has a large drooping-red flower, shaped something like a fuchsia’. The genus, which was named
Erythrina
by Linnaeus in 1753 with the annotation ‘corallodendron’, has a Gondwanan distribution. Australia has a number of native species, but the specimens shown by Hill were almost certainly examples of the South American Cock’s Spur Coral Tree,
Erythrina crista-galli
, the national flower of Argentina and Paraguay. Around the turn of the century a now forgotten plant breeder produced a new hybrid Erythrina and presented it to the Brisbane Botanical Garden, where it grows to this day. Its parentage is unknown, but it is thought to be a hybrid of the American
E. coralloides
and the African
E. lysistemon
. It was not until the 1960s that a botanist called William Sykes, who saw the same Coral Tree growing all over New Zealand, identified it as a hybrid cultivar, hence its current name
Erythrina
x
sykesii
. Though the hybrid does not set fertile seed, it has now joined
E. crista-galli
as a serious weed of rainforest in Australia because, even after it has been poisoned and is apparently dead, the fallen branches are capable of rooting and regenerating. Both Coral Trees are beloved of suburban gardeners for the crowded hands of bright red flowers that appear before the thick, dark, leathery leaves. It took us five years to eliminate them from the CCRRS rainforest.

The latest count by Tony Bean of the Queensland Herbarium yields five native
Erythrina
species, which the early nurserymen might have collected and improved. The local version of
E. vespertilio
has flowers of burnt orange shading to espresso brown-black at the base. Another local species, now called
E. numerosa
(it was
E.
sp. Croftby), is peach-pink, with its protruding anthers stained rose-madder. You will see blood-red Coral Trees in their millions in north-east New South Wales and south-east Queensland; you are most unlikely to see any of these slower-growing and more elegant natives.

The pattern was early set: Australian nurserymen would not bother to propagate or improve local species; instead they would import seed and specimens of exotic species. It’s hard to believe that the same settlers who tore out, knocked down and burnt the hundreds of species of trees that grew naturally in south-east Queensland were happy to spend proper money on half-a-dozen species of exotic trees to plant around their houses. Anyone who didn’t plant a Coral Tree and a Jacaranda in the front garden was deemed insensible to beauty.

Native groundcovers were weeds by definition; they too were uprooted and burnt, to be replaced by long avenues of Agapanthus. Attempts to prevent the sale of Agapanthus varieties in Australia have been strongly resisted by the horticultural industry. Australian gardens are still full of them, as well as thousands of other exotics many of which have serious weed potential. Various Heliotropes, Gladioli, daisies, lilies, Oxalis, Honeysuckles, gingers, Verbenas, Vincas, Gazanias, Morning Glories, Moth Vine, Mother-in-law’s Tongue and Watsonias are declared weeds already, and there are more where those came from. The situation was summarised in 2005 for the World Wildlife Fund by CSIRO botanists: